Many Martinez and only one Dibu

Qatar, its World Cup, has served to verify a trend that we would do well to try to review: we have become the catechists of football, some gray guys in V-neck sweaters who point their fingers at the sins of their protagonists.

Dibu Martínez, for example, is raining sticks these days for making fun of Mbappé while hundreds of his compatriots risked their lives to admire the image from an overhead shot.

Perhaps the time has come to admit that everything in this life is a matter of perspective, including criticism of a type of neighborhood that has just achieved the impossible and finds in the easy wink a way to prolong the collective ecstasy.

Moralina and soccer reinvent the famous joke of yogurt with chorizo, that impossible mixture that we requested in the town's grocery stores to tell it the next day at recess.

We admire ourselves, very dignified, accusing the footballer of not being up to the task, just because he has something to celebrate while we leave the towel in the bathroom every morning, inordinately confident that we don't have a television camera focusing on our every move. .

Dibu was aware of the millimeter scrutiny, how could he not be: one wins the World Cup to allow himself some excess and desecrate, if necessary, the image of the final monster, that sports ogre who tried to steal the party from you in the nose,

something recurring in the liturgy of success since Red Auerbach baptized those formidable cigars he smoked with the names of his victims.

Take naturalness out of the equation, and you're left with something akin to politics, figure skating, or a Coldplay concert.

We criticize the Dibu at forty beats per minute -which is the maximum degree of excitement that one can achieve writing an opinion article, let alone a tweet- for its excesses.

Or the Mourinho who desecrated the Camp Nou harassed by the sprinklers and with his finger held high, reminding God that miracles are not the exclusive domain of immortals.

At what point do we establish the threshold of what is admissible when we barely count as a usable reference the high point of our greatest celebration?

Mine, and I admit it with some shame, was limited to singing the "dad, tell me what it feels like" to my own father the day my mother appointed me habitual driver in the compulsory insurance of her new and brand new utility.

Populacherism and social networks have turned us into beings of light who accumulate hearts and good comments based on feigning virtues: it is the fate of the new times.

At this rate, the day will come when someone discovers the definitive cure for cancer, celebrates it by using a test tube as a phallus, or hesitating another researcher who tried it before him and ended up patenting a hair grower, and a tide of moralists will make their behavior ugly on Facebook, or they will set up a campaign so that no one with a minimum of ethics and social conscience admits the treatment.

Nobody, not even another Martínez, knows what went through Dibu's head after avoiding a national catastrophe in extra time and coming out victorious on penalties.

Everything else is football, although not only football, a network of sensations that escape us from those of us who, as the most remarkable success in the field of sport, convinced our mothers to buy some Reebok Pump with the false promise of jumping a little more. and pass, finally, the happy subject of Physical Education.

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